Did You Know That Your Soul Is a ‘Desire to Enjoy’?

Like the earth in the story of Genesis, the soul must go through a certain process of development in the body. It takes more than one lifetime to complete the process, meaning that the soul clothes itself in many bodies over many cycles. Although the process is clear, we can go our entire life without feeling that we have a soul, a spiritual component, thus not realizing the purpose of our life in this world.

As we have said, the soul is merely a desire to enjoy, to receive. It defines the attributes and the needs of the body, while the body itself is a dead object. The development of the soul creates different needs in the human being. Its desires change with its evolution from desires for bodily pleasures—food, sleep, and sex, just as in animals—to the desire to return to its spiritual state, its primary state from which it descended to this world.

Those desires do not evolve one at a time, but in a jumble. That is why a person can feel he or she has a craving for knowledge and at the same time a desire for money, honor, and sex. It happens in any person, because all the desires are made of a unique compound.

Why the Desire for Spirituality Is Unique

The same principle applies to the desire for spirituality. It can be revealed along with lower desires, but what distinguishes it is that we cannot satisfy it with anything mundane, because the source for this desire is outside our world. The revelation of such a desire testifies to the degree of development of the soul.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why Abraham Is Just As Relevant Today As He Ever Was

Just as the Creation story can be used to help us understand the evolution of our souls and our purpose on the earth, the story of Abraham the Patriarch teaches us about the essentials of growing toward the Creator and coming to know Him in our lives to fulfill our purpose in life. Anyone who ascends from this world toward the Creator and unites with Him must take the same path that Abraham first took, and for which he is regarded as the father of the nation.

If we relate to the Torah as a historic tale, we will see that it is not very different from the histories of other nations. But the Torah does not deal with the past, rather it deals with us. It deals with each and every one of us; with who we are and what we are and what we must do with our lives. The Creator appeals only to people, to each and every person. That is how the Torah explains the entire system of creation. Each person contains everything that exists in all the worlds inside him or her, including our own world. Besides humanity, there is only the Creator. Humanity is the representative of creation and of all the other worlds.

What ‘Abraham’ Really Is

The Creator turns to Abraham, who represents a specific attribute in us and who is like all other properties (nations) in a human (Av Ha’am, Abraham in Hebrew, means “the father of the nation”), and tells him: “I now separate this specific trait in you, which is called Abraham, and you must leave your country, meaning your situation and all the desires that you cur- rently feel. Go from your homeland, and break free from the desires you were born with.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Now You Can Interpret the Bible Properly and Get Everything Out of It

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Now the earth was unformed and void,and darkness was upon the face of the deep;and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.And God said:“Let there be light.”And there was light.And God saw the light,that it was good;and God divided the light from the darkness.And God called the light Day,and the darkness He called Night.And there was evening and there was morning, one day. (Gen.1:1–5)

Every one of us, when hearing these verses, is moved in some way. However, we rarely settle for the simplified interpretations that leave many questions open. What does the Torah really talk about? And most importantly, what for?

All the holy Scriptures speak of one thing only—the upper world and how it was created and how the upper world created our world. The Bible doesn’t just describe what one finds in that world, but also teaches one how to see it. The gradual revelation of the upper world is called the “spiritual ascent,” or the degrees of spiritual rise. The wisdom of Kabbalah is a science that teaches the structure of the upper world, using sophisticated language, drawings, and schemes. The Torah describes the upper world for us in an ordinary language.

Do You Make these Mistakes When it Comes to Interpreting the Bible?

If we try to translate the language of the Torah into the language of the Wisdom of Kabbalah, we see that the Torah describes for us the process of the creation of the upper world, its structure, the design of its development, and after that it depicts the process of humankind’s creation. However, the Torah does not refer to a person of our corporeal world. Rather it refers to the creation of the will to receive, called “soul” or “man” (Adam), and to the purpose of fulfilling this will to receive, this creation, with total, eternal, and complete pleasure. The desire for pleasure is actually the only creation. Besides that there is only the Creator. Thus, everything besides the Creator is no more than various degrees of the will to receive pleasure. That is also the situation in our world: the difference between all creatures and objects is only in the different levels of their will to receive pleasure, and that is what determines the properties of each and every creature.

Read the rest of this entry »

Who Was Baal HaSulam?

Since Abraham and Moses there have been many brilliant Kabbalists through the generations, writing some of the fundamental books of Kabbalah, The Zohar and the Ari’s writings being the most important among them.

However, in the end, neither The Zohar nor the writings of the Ari were intended for a systematic study of the Kabbalah. Although the Kabbalah is indeed a science, before the 20^th century there never was a true textbook. It is only in our days that a comprehensive and concise method suitable for all souls of this world was established. To fill in the gaps, Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag, the great Kabbalist who was born in Warsaw in 1885 and lived in Jerusalem from 1922 until his death in 1954, wrote a commentary on the Zohar and the texts of the Ari. Rabbi Ashlag, called Baal HaSulam (Master of the Ladder), evolved while writing the commentaries and published his principal work, The Study of the Ten Sefirot (Talmud Eser Sefirot), considered the predominant Kabbalah study book of our time.

This textbook consists of six volumes, containing more than two thousand pages. It includes everything that Kabbalists have written since the dawn of time: the writings of the first man, Abraham the Patriarch, Moses, Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yochai, and the Holy Ari. This book displays Kabbalah in a concise manner, fit for study. Thus, we have with us today everything needed to learn how creation was made, how it comes down to us, and how we can influence it from below, all the way to the highest world, to have the future we’d like to have.

Why Kabbalah Is Completely Opposite to Other Spiritual Teachings

Today The Zohar is incomprehensible without the Sulam commentary. Yet, the method of Baal HaSulam is often misunderstood. To those who have not achieved spiritual fulfillment, the book may be perceived as dry, schematic, and unemotional. It can read like an instruction manual rather than something that moves our heart. But this perception stems from a lack of understanding.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Mystery of Reincarnation Explained

In each generation, the same souls that existed in previous generations reappear. They are clothed in new bodies, evolve, and become more sensitive and receptive to sublime and complex spiritual knowledge. Thus, people who lived thousands of years ago had the same souls as our own but are more developed today, bringing technological and spiritual progress to our world.

Any progress in humankind is the result of souls rising to a higher degree, after having gained experience in previous lives. Each soul that comes to our world begins its life with the experiences it has accumulated in the previous life. Hence, the soul goes through a process of accumulating knowledge, spiritual attainments, and worldly sensations, leaving it with memories we call Reshimot (records or reminiscences).

Of all the souls that have come down to our world from previous generations, only a few have wished to evolve into the spiritual realms. However, in our time, many have done so. We are much more advanced than our ancestors. It is easier for us to absorb new information and live it, because we are born prepared to absorb this information. Hence, each new piece of data is completely natural for us.

How the Concealment of Kabbalah and Reincarnation are Related

Kabbalah books tend to be revealed and concealed intermittently. They can be hidden for several generations, reappear, and then be lost again. It happens this way so that humanity can go through certain “corrections” (Tikkunim). Generally speaking, these books exist throughout the history of humankind to correct humanity and assure its development. All these books will be known to everyone in the future. The Zohar and the books of the prophets state that in our final days, all humanity will use these books as manuals for attaining the upper worlds, and people will have happy, eternal, and complete lives.

Souls of great Kabbalists go through special cycles. They do not appear in our world in every generation but, like the books, only in special ones. The soul of the first man incarnated later on in Abraham the Patriarch, Moses, Rabbi Shimon Bar- Yochai, the Holy Ari, and, in our days, Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag.

Such a soul comes only during special times, when it is meant to influence and correct the entire human race.

The Story of the Reincarnation of a Very Special Soul: The Ari

In the 16th century, the time of the Middle Ages and barbarism, a child was born in Jerusalem. Later in his life he received the name the Holy Ari. He absorbed the entire Kabbalistic knowledge since the first man and processed it and phrased it in such a way that all the generations following him could receive their spiritual nourishment from his books.

Read the rest of this entry »